


I Could’ve Told You (About the Long Nights)

by ShadowsLament



Series: Will You Haunt Me (To Set Us Both Free) [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: #SaveDaredevil, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 06:28:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17934566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: Matt comes to terms with his time at the convent before Frank’s unexpected arrival changes everything.





	I Could’ve Told You (About the Long Nights)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a missing scene (of a kind) from Outta My Head, the first fic in this series, but it’s not strictly necessary to have read that series starter prior to this. Without that background, there are two things to note before going ahead: I’ve placed the convent well outside of the city, and Matt has been claimed by a massive black dog named Hugo.

“That’s not a word.”

“Where’s the goddamn—Here.” The dictionary shoved across the table, Lee pulled back his hand, rapped the Scrabble board with a hardened arthritic finger. “Check.”

The men argued, and from a distance, Matt listened. Crouched in the brief pauses between curses, threaded through the gaps in a surprisingly long and heated etymological confrontation, Matt found it: fondness. A gruff brand of affection, maybe, but Matt had overheard enough of their stories to know that it had taken root on foreign soil and grown up around decades of debates over women and board games, that it had stretched to cover miles and hospital corridors. It had been present in every trench, and unshakeable when life, the loss of it, had left them covered in grief thicker than mud after months of rain.

“What do you think, Matt?” Horace called over. “Should I let the bastard have it?”

“You’d still be ahead by thirty points.” Matt’s sixth attempt to shift on his seat—to regain feeling in his legs and left arm—proved as unsuccessful as the previous tries. Hugo took back the inch Matt won, redistributing his weight over Matt’s thighs. The dog huffed, nosed at Matt’s hand until it opened, licked over the heart and life lines on his palm, broken by calluses and bisected by slight scars, until Matt also huffed, a laugh that lightened his voice. “Couldn’t hurt, right?”

“‘Course it could. Why in hell would I be playing this game otherwise?”

“Masochist,” Lee said, like it was shorthand for an inside joke or a possible epitaph, “always have been.”

Horace shuffled several tiles on a wooden rack. Matt could imagine the man’s expression, the mock outrage and obvious delight that went hand-in-hand with any other game brought out repeatedly by the same players. It was there in his tone when he said, “You got no idea what I get up to in the bedroom.”

“If only that were true. I’d be a happier man,” Lee insisted, “with run of the mill nightmares.”

His smile faint, Matt eased away from their conversation. Realized the wicker beneath his elbow was broken, that it had scratched and stung skin still dressed in bruises. It had taken several weeks to lose strips of medical tape to the depths of his borrowed bed, butterfly bandages to a particular path through the convent’s garden, to shed the wrapping around his ribs and leave it on the attic floor. After an hour of playing the part of an armchair for a long and heavy dog, Matt wondered, briefly, if the gauze was still up there.

Ignoring a jab of pain provoked by the sudden move, Matt leaned his forehead against cool fur that smelled of mint and camphor. “Didn’t Sister Katherine tell you to stay away from those pots?”

A fragrant flick of Hugo’s tail—like a spill of soil and seeds, like another pot knocked over—stood in for the dog’s answer.

“Keep it up and you’re going to get us kicked out.”

Lee snorted. “That dog’s been tryin’ to get you sprung from here from the day he turned up.”

“That’s three of us that know you don’t belong in this place, Matt.” Horace arranged four tiles on the board, sat back from the table on a breath that struggled to sound free and easy. “Make a call, get someone to take you home.”

How these men defined home, Matt could fill in a few gaps and make an educated guess, he could be fairly certain it didn’t glance at the ropes of a boxing ring, or at a table bearing reddened rags, a bottle of booze beside a depleted first aid kit. That it didn’t include the indentations left by a ballpoint pen on a paper napkin, or a plaque mounted around shoulder-level on the side of a rundown building. Their definition probably contained a closet with suits on the rack, coats and pants made of wool or cotton, not an article of clothing that revoked their right to make that phone call, or that, in putting it on, stripped them of their right to ask for anything.

Matt slanted his lips over the crest of Hugo’s ear, sat back. “Not yet.” 

If he’d thought the words toneless, an idea supported by the scraping dryness of his throat and mouth, their shared response to it—a heavy quiet after thirty minutes of non-stop bickering—seemed to prove Matt wrong. He shrugged, and smiled, and added another lie to the pile, “I’m fine here.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Matt paced Hugo’s back with his fingertips. “If I go back to the city, someone will swear at me, yeah, but not like that. And let’s say I find a place to sit and listen while old men complain about lumpy pillows, and tasteless meatloaf, and the bird—“

“It’s some kinda sparrow.”

“Or a jay.”

“It’s a catbird, but my point is—“

“How—“

“Swallow the rest of that sentence, Lee, for Christ’s sake. He’s blind, not deaf.”

The conservatory’s glass walls contained the resumed volley of their voices, the abundance of plants and wicker furniture somewhat softening the volume. When another heartbeat entered the room, its pace inconsistent but mostly too quick, treading away from Hugo, Matt scratched a line down the dog’s flank. “If you let me up we’ll go for a walk.”

Allowed to stand, Matt momentarily flashed back to each time his mind had become a stopwatch, tracking the minutes it took to find steady footing, before he could finally move against a widespread march of pins and needles. To accept pain like grenades, never landing where he expected, leaving him to assess and reevaluate the damage. Constantly. He had felt the absence of his strength like an absence of will, in spite of everything, in spite of every goddamned morning he got up and got dressed, and though the room on loan to him was scarcely furnished, it bore the brunt of his frustration. The sheets and scattered rosary beads. The schoolroom chair and the battered tin tray from the dresser. 

The Bible, he didn’t touch. 

The book sat on the desk, still, beneath the window Matt left open at all hours. Occasionally a breeze would stir the curtains, would send the material swaying into the room. When he was near enough to it, the material moved like a light hand over his knuckles, over his wrist or his forearm, and standing there he could almost—Closing his eyes, Matt braced a hand on Hugo’s head and walked towards the door that promised fresh air, sunlight on his skin.

Chairs grazed along the terrace. More creaking wicker, cushions that sat like a concrete slab. Hugo padded ahead, nudged Matt away from the corner of a low table when his attention strayed to an engine’s rough growl. Tires chewing on loose gravel. Murmuring his thanks, Matt held tighter to Hugo’s fur as they took the steps down to a lawn of shorn grass, set out on a familiar route. 

After—He’d been left on the convent’s doorstep like one of those Victorian orphans literature leaned on. Older, sure, and bloodied, with nothing but the clothes on his back, clothes that weren’t his, and a pair of glasses in one pocket. No watch, no phone, no means to confirm how many halting hours he eventually put into mapping the grounds. To know exactly how long it took him to conclude the property was divided into flower gardens and a vegetable patch, that if he walked far enough he’d enter a grid of shivering saplings, pines and firs, tall maples that stood like a clutch of high-rises. 

No means, except for the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs. Two days after Matt fully regained consciousness it had lost a gear and gone silent.

Veering off, Hugo stopped to sniff at—and piss on—one of several bird baths scattered across the gardens. Matt waited, smiling, and when the dog rushed back, pointed at the drenched base. “Did Lee tell you to do that?”

It was actually possible, considering how often Lee griped about the number of feeders the sisters maintained and the resultant bird shit. Horace grabbed that baton, ran with it, extending the complaint to include the gardener’s battalion of mowers and weed wackers, their combined noise being louder than exploding shells. Supposedly. But all of that, it was just talk. As far as Matt could determine, as long as they had a pack of cards, strong coffee and each other, they were satisfied. 

Content enough where they were to sleep soundly.

And Matt was good with that being the case. He was glad unconsciousness didn’t confront them with an endless string of men with guns or knives. That it didn’t echo with the chime of chain link on metal scaffolding, or return them to a building reduced to rubble and shattered glass. Glad sleep didn’t prove how—It was just as well that Lee and Horace snored behind closed doors, unaware of Matt opening his only to linger with a hand on the handle, the other on the doorframe. For a moment, until he got a loose grip on his bearings.

For a while, at the beginning of his stay, it had been—He’d had to take it step by slow step.

White noise—crickets and nocturnal birds, restless wings; agitated pond water; the heavy labor of every other breath he was forced to take—it was like drying cement, something Matt had to push through. The grid was never really a destination he had in mind, but night after night that’s where he wound up. Running unsteady fingers over entwined initials and psalms— _Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty_ —carved into the trees’ trunks and low-hanging branches. When he stumbled over an exposed root, a rock or his pride, when he collapsed, it was beneath that canopy. With bark that felt like brick at his back. No witnesses, no implacable voices echoing off walls laid out in unrecognizable dimensions, telling him to try again, to try harder, to pick up a glass, a fork, the pieces. To trust in God.

How long he stayed out there, tightening his tether to a tilted world, trying to find a reason to rise with the sun—After Hugo, that reason was at least within Matt’s reach.

Angled towards those trees, turning leaves that shifted and shushed, Matt considered a change of course. Discarded the thought, and walked over to the pond, skirting the slick grass flattened across the bank. He listened to Hugo take issue with the encroaching ducks, the half-dozen or so that waded from the water in search of food scraps, and whatever it was that caught and kindled in Matt’s chest, he imagined it as wildfire: warm, ever-expanding. 

Thinking of the crusts Lee refused to eat and Horace only pilfered from the other man’s plate on odd days of the week, Matt offered the ducks a one-shoulder shrug and promised, “Next time,” before crouching to scratch around Hugo’s ears. “What should we do today?”

Hugo pressed forward, trusting Matt’s balance, his open arms. 

With Hugo’s head tucked in so tight and close, the cooling air was mint sweet, laced with a small stinging trace of menthol, the potted hyssops’ pungent camphor. Matt inhaled, long and deep, and held the breath until it had to be let go. The fur beneath his nose sifted and stirred. He’d end up with some of it in his mouth, loose strands that clung to the shadow of his stubble, that slipped through the cracks of his dry lips. Matt didn’t care. All those long days and longer nights the dog had been there, wouldn’t be shaken from Matt’s side or leave him alone in a room, Hugo’s heartbeat strong and steady when Matt’s faltered, for that—What was a little fur on Matt’s tongue?

A nose cold as snow swiped up Matt’s throat and jaw. Hugo pawed the ground until Matt lowered a hand to scratch that leg. 

“We could find the frisbee Sister Sarah brought you. Or we could sit,” Matt said when Hugo abruptly did just that. “But maybe up on the steps. Lee will never let me hear the end of it if he sees mud on my ass.”

He might have sung a few low, rolling notes, but Hugo stood with Matt and loped beside him across the length of the lawn. Covered in fine cracks that pinched the heel of Matt’s palm, the top step was as comfortable as any of the chairs on the terrace, with room enough for Hugo to lean against him. 

Unmoved by minutes passing, Matt listened to the mirrored sighs of the dog and the breeze. He heard Lee and Horace in the conservatory, trading verbal blows over the final Scrabble tally; heard the front door open on original hinges that hadn’t been given any grease in months, maybe a year, and wasn’t surprised when the door wasn’t immediately shut. Closer, the near-silent stride of thick-soled military issue combat boots over gravel and grass—Matt turned his head, cocked up his chin.

Coffee, unrelieved by cream or sugar, the dregs left in a convenient store pot for the desperate. Motor and gun oil on cotton cuffs. Sweat raised by stale heat trapped in the confines of a car or truck. A musky dampness: rainwater absorbed by denim and left to dry by degrees. Paper bound before Matt had learned how to read. Matt filtered each scent, identified one for every undeviating beat of the man’s heart, one for every even breath taken as he drew closer, stepped around a back corner of the convent. 

The man stopped at a distance of several feet.

His brow tightened and creased by a frown, Matt waited. And waited, but it was Hugo that spoke, a growl pitched deep down in his throat. Matt felt its vibration along the arm he had around the dog, and minutely firming his hold, straightened.

“It’s customary to bring flowers, Frank.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this fic is taken from Dermot Kennedy’s “Lost,” a song that opens with the lyrics:
> 
> _When everything was broken…the devil hit his second stride._
> 
> I’m holding fast to my faith that our Devil will hit his second stride, and what’s more, that we’ll see him again in the same guise.
> 
> Thank you for reading! And to the wonderful, dedicated fans behind the #SaveDaredevil campaign: Thank you for working so tirelessly to further the cause!


End file.
